Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. III.djvu/434

406 406 REGENCY OF XIMENES. PART by his Flemish advisers, sturdily persisted in his '- — purpose. The cardinal, consequently, called a meet- ing of the prelates and principal nobles in Madrid, to which he had transferred the seat of government, and whose central position and other local advan- tages made it, from this time forward, with little variation, the regular capital of the kingdom.^ The doctor Carbajal prepared a studied and plausible argument in support of the measure.^ As it failed, however, to produce conviction in his audience, Ximenes, chafed by the opposition, and probably distrusting its real motives, peremptorily declared, that those who refused to acknowledge Charles as king, in the present state of things, would refuse to obey him when he was so. " I will have him proclaimed in Madrid to-morrow," said he, " and I doubt not every other city in the kingdom will fol- low the example." He was as good as his word ; and the conduct of the capital was imitated, with little opposition, by all the other cities in Castile. Not so in Aragon, whose people were too much at- tached to their institutions to consent to it, till Charles first made oath in person to respect the laws and liberties of the realm.^ 4 It became permanentl)'- so in rests much stronger on expe-liency, the following reign of Philip II. than precedent. Anales, MS.,aiio Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. p. 79. 1516, cap. 11. 5 Carbajal penetrates into the 6 Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. remotest depths of Spanish histo- 151 et seq. — Carbajal, Anales, ry for an authority for Charles's MS., ano 1516, cap. 9- 11. — La- claim. He can find none better, nuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 2, cap. however, than the examples of Al- 2. — Dormer, Anales de Aragon, fonso VIII. and Ferdinand III.; lib. 1, cap. 1, 13. — Peter Martyr, the former of whom used force. Opus Epist., epist. 572, 590, 603. and the latter obtained the crown — Sandoval, Hist, del Emp. Carlos by the voluntary cession of his V., tom. i. p. 53. mother. His argument, it is clear,